Gentle is the most fitting word to describe the aura of “The Last Bus,” Gillies MacKinnon’s placid travelogue of a movie about an ailing Englishman on a heartrending mission. Sadly, the filmmaker’s road trip errs on the side of excessive gentleness. For a tender movie that follows an old man on a long and demanding multi-bus excursion to honor his late wife’s wishes, the placid affair has curiously little emotional range, and an even narrower sense of stakes.
Playing the retired engineer Tom, the British gentleman in question, a believably aged Timothy Spall gives the character his all, infusing him with a palpable sense of countryside dignity, but perhaps leaning a bit heavily on an exaggeratedly old speech pattern mostly made up of breathy mumblings. Respectably clad and holding onto his deceased wife Mary’s ashes for dear life, Tom leaves his John o’ Groats home — a...
Playing the retired engineer Tom, the British gentleman in question, a believably aged Timothy Spall gives the character his all, infusing him with a palpable sense of countryside dignity, but perhaps leaning a bit heavily on an exaggeratedly old speech pattern mostly made up of breathy mumblings. Respectably clad and holding onto his deceased wife Mary’s ashes for dear life, Tom leaves his John o’ Groats home — a...
- 2/18/2022
- by Tomris Laffly
- Variety Film + TV
A widower takes a nostalgic journey from John o’Groats to Land’s End using his free bus pass in a well-acted but overly sentimental film
Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this weirdly unreal and sentimental Britmovie in the last-journey-with-someone’s-ashes genre. But it is certainly acted with commitment and integrity by Timothy Spall, who plays an old, sick widower courageously making his peace with the past.
Spall is Tom, a retired engineer who lives in John o’Groats in the northerly tip of Scotland; he and his late wife, Mary – a decent cameo for Phyllis Logan – once lived as a young married couple in Land’s End (that is: England’s most southerly point) but came to settle up there because they wanted to put as much geographical and emotional distance as possible between them and an awful tragedy that struck them in the first year of their marriage.
Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this weirdly unreal and sentimental Britmovie in the last-journey-with-someone’s-ashes genre. But it is certainly acted with commitment and integrity by Timothy Spall, who plays an old, sick widower courageously making his peace with the past.
Spall is Tom, a retired engineer who lives in John o’Groats in the northerly tip of Scotland; he and his late wife, Mary – a decent cameo for Phyllis Logan – once lived as a young married couple in Land’s End (that is: England’s most southerly point) but came to settle up there because they wanted to put as much geographical and emotional distance as possible between them and an awful tragedy that struck them in the first year of their marriage.
- 8/26/2021
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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